This invention relates to an apparatus for dispensing food products such as ice creams, yogurts, sherberts and other frozen or semi-frozen dessert confections. This invention also relates to an apparatus for dispensing food products from collapsible containers.
Soft serve frozen and semi-frozen confections are widely used in the food industry and have a broad customer appeal. Although ice creams are the most widely known product dispensed in a soft serve form, an expanding market based on alternative frozen and semi-frozen confections, such as yogurts, also exists. The most common means of dispensing soft serve confections is by extrusion into an edible cone or other suitable container, and the confection is generally intended for immediate consumption.
It is well known that soft serve confectionary products can be easily extruded from dispensing apparatuses to a variety of patterns or shapes. The most common means of dispensing a frozen confection has been the extruding of a continuous ribbon or rod that can be coiled on itself to form a cone having a beehive-type shape. Moreover, the soft serve confectionary products ideally have sufficient strength to retain the extruded shape for a sufficient time to allow for consumer consumption. U.S. Pat. No. 5,048,724 teaches an apparatus for dispensing soft serve frozen confections such as ice cream and yogurts utilizing a collapsible container that contains the frozen confection therein. The collapsible container includes an outlet of sufficient size to permit extrusion of frozen confection therefrom upon collapsing the container. However, one of the principal drawbacks in the use of the apparatus as taught in the U.S. Pat. No. 5,048,724 is that when the collapsible container is mounted in a vertical position for dispensing from the side at the top of the container, upon collapsing of the container from the bottom up, the collapsible container has a tendency to collapse into the outlet as the container gets near empty thereby preventing the flow of confectionary therefrom.